Right now I’m sitting in a bright marble breakfast room near Universal Studios. It’s 7a.m. in Florida. The room is full of couples and families getting ready to explore the parks for the day. I tried to write this post last night. I said I would write every Wednesday. Not that anyone is waiting. Still, I want to keep the rhythm. But it didn’t work last night. I deleted the post and went to sleep; I was too jet lagged and famished to find clarity. Now, sitting with my watery coffee, bowl of fruit and muffin, all my big thoughts about Wittgenstein and language and digital mind from last night seem obscure, maybe even pointless: What does all that matter to this breakfast room and the people here? What does being a philosopher and all this training in the cognitive sciences really matter here? to this place? right now?

No answer comes easily. Studying the cognitive sciences (especially the more technical and theoretical they get) can put one in a bubble. Real life can feel so far from it, but real life is where all this stuff matters, so how can I find the tendrils to connect these octopuses of inclination, thought and feeling that are right now swimming together as me and my life and this place and all these lives around me?

The first thing to do is stop trying, so I just sit here. I try to be here, fully.

My little breakfast table faces the buffet, so there’s no avoiding seeing all the action. I’m surprised at the way it feels when I let myself notice, really notice. I’m surprised at how amazed I am, in fact, just to be here and watch people being themselves. I am in one of those states of mind (maybe because of all the travel and strange scheduling) where it really feels remarkable that we as humans are here at all, doing all these things we do, like making theme parks and hotels and breakfasts and families. And it seems even more amazing to imagine all we could do, if we really cared about doing it.

People are coming in the doors and standing in line for their food. There is a beautiful red-haired lady who reminds me of my mom, her somber husband and their three young boys; a Spanish-speaking couple and their daughter, a young bookish girl wearing stylish glasses who already looks like she’d fit in well at Oxford; a young woman with her hair in rollers; a lady behind the buffet calling out to a person who left their bagel in the oven. Have any of these folks ever imagined their mind as a compass and a vehicle all at once? Do they already realize they are making the world for one another?

I wonder if it would be exciting (or just overwhelming) for them to consider that their mind actually begins and ends nowhere, that mind is not ‘stuck in their heads’ but rather that it is in their whole body and all its relations to itself and everyone around them. Do they think they are their thoughts? Or do they already sense that their mind is not just the thoughts they are having but their whole way of making sense of this room, of finding the coffee, sizing up the sausages to see if they’re too greasy, getting the right stuff for the kids, getting the kids to eat the right stuff. There is such richness here, and I wonder how we could better notice and orient as part of it. Every way I try and imagine how to word this, the sentences feel too watery (like my coffee) or too stale (like my muffin), and yet (also like the coffee and muffin), there is something nourishing me.

There is something about considering all this in this space that gives me energy and brings a fresh sort of inspiration. This feeling mostly comes just from being here and noticing this as it is. I start to feel my connection as part of it, a connection I am always entangled with. I look at these beautiful women, these mothers, and it is as if all that beauty and strength and care is part of me as well—what they are doing is showing what is possible. This exists, and here for a moment, I am in existence with it, without beginnings or ends. All these people from all parts of the world, here in this little room, bringing with them all the steps they have ever taken, all the conversations they have ever had, all the films and books and songs and walks and drives and bicycle rides. All these dimensions and lines of movement, here tangled together in this room; any one of us could say some small thing to any other of us and that could change everything, a new threading together of worlds in all these living dynamic trajectories.

Sitting here, I remember having these sorts of trips with my parents when I was a kid: I still remember some of the things my parents or others said or did and how it shifted my own paths, but mostly what I remember is not in words or language but in the shifts that came from being together, from all that bodily interaction.

That interaction is mind and cognition.

And it is precious, ongoing, precarious, beautiful.

What is especially remarkable about this breakfast room, however, is that not a single person here is on their phone. They are all talking to one another and dealing with all that awkwardness of trying to be in real life. And even though I am writing this piece, I also did not bring a phone or computer or anything; I have a notebook and a pen and I am taking notes (that I will type out later this morning between meetings). There is nothing digital here. But what is here is mind. All this interaction. All this emotion and decision making and being. This is the real base and majority of cognition, and yet, that is not how we mostly define or assume mind; we mostly think of cognition or thinking as all that is not this—as all that stuff that seems to be in our heads.

But it’s not.

Cognition is cognition long before you call it that.

It’s you in your mother’s body. It’s you listening before you can talk, crawling till you walk. It’s all those touches and cries and connections and ways of being and being with that make you and that you are making. It is all that you will never remember in words or even in images, and it’s all that even more than it is what you ever know you are thinking—you know much more than you think, much more than you speak.

What we remember and all the language that goes with it, is just the tip of that dynamic nonstop unending iceberg. It is all that is beneath that water and it is the water itself as it becomes us, as it moves and shifts and makes all that we encounter, both as others and as ourselves. It is all that we overlook, all the feeling and moving that we are always making, and that is always making us.

Mind is what most people never consider to part of it.

Watching all this mind in movement around me feels like such as a stark contrast to so much of what I have been reading and hearing about ‘mind’ and ‘cognition’ lately elsewhere, in places where so many of us are discussing ‘digital minds’, discussing ‘mind’ as if it is nothing but language, as if languages are symbols that we can put into patterns, as if this is static logic, as if all this ongoing everything can be reduced to the patterns and readouts we get through measuring it with the fanciest tools.

As much as I love all those tools and as much as I believe in all they can help us understand and observe, they are never more than a blueprint of what we are all together always making through our living, breathing, feeling, entangling lives.

Digital minds are not minds by any measurement.

Still, it is so seductive to imagine them, to imagine a clean clear place where there is no vulnerability, where we can see what a mind is, and mark where it begins and ends. Oh how seductive it is to imagine we can have relations with these minds and thus always know where we stand and how to assess every part of them. And yet, to do so is to lose our mind, actually, or to mistake it for what has been measured of it. Mind is not digital. Mind is all the precarity, the precariousness and mess, of what is under the surface and what only ever just peeks above it. What gives us life and lets us rise above the water is the ongoing precarity of everything creating and co-creating everything else. Minds are traces and tangles and lines of all that, and they are not able to be absolutely contained, measured, or assessed. They are not digital, cannot be condensed into readouts of 0s and 1s. Everything digital is a way for us to get some clarity about the map, but there is no territory that is absolutely assessable or static. That’s why we call it life.

The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once had the idea that what you can know about thinking is only what can be clearly said. But in writing that, what he was really showing us is that all that is most present and real and important for us is not thinking and is not language (that of which we cannot speak). We only use language and logic so as to come into better awareness of what we cannot use language or logic to assess, precisely because what really matters cannot be captured or caught in anything so static as the symbolic. Much as we wish it were that clean. Much as we wish we could control it. To do so is to lose it.

Mind and cognition are not just thinking and language. Thinking and language are only a very small part of all this ultimately un-assessable always-changing mind as movement; there is no clear beginning or end, and to measure it only perpetuates it.

Instead, luckily, we have the child throwing the tantrum, the weather outside with the storms that make visiting the theme park difficult, the dad who feels unsure he can really handle being a father to his boys, the sister who says something mean to her brother and then cries because she has shocked herself, the frustration of the lady who just wants the guy to come back and get his bagel.